The Ugly Stepsister By Aya Ling

I received the ebook of this story from the author for an honest review.

Three (3) Points that Explain My Feelings for The Ugly Stepsister

The story was too long for its own good. According to Goodreads, The Ugly Stepsister is 452 pages long that’s about 300 pages too many. From what I remember of Disney’s version of Cinderella spanned about 2-3 weeks, but The Ugly Stepsister seemed to span months. I get that it’s a retelling so it’s going to be different, but it shouldn’t be unnecessarily long.

Besides the fact that the story is a retelling, it was very predictable. From the first couple of chapters, I could tell how the story was going to end, which made me more irritable that it lasted so long.

The execution lacked a bit of imagination. Having the protagonist play the part of the stepsister is an original idea, but again the ending was predictable and the overall flow of the story didn’t off any twists to spark interest. The main reason I thought the execution was poor was that from the beginning Kat rips the book, gets called downstairs by her mother, and proceeds to fall down the stairs. This to me meant that there was a 99.9% chance that Ling was going to end the story with Kat waking up after a couple of hours and realizing that “it was all just a dream.” I would have preferred to read the 0.1% chance where the explanation for Kat’s experience is an alternate universe/ multidimensional theory. To clarify, I wanted Kat to sucked into some sort of mystical tornado after she ripped the book and then went through Ling’s version of Cinderella instead of the story going with the “dream/hallucination/thought” explanation. Does this make the story much different than it occurred? No, but at least I know in the end that Kat actually went through all the stuff I read about instead of her just waking up at the end. I’m being picky, but The Ugly Stepsister is so long and so predictable.